Word: naipauls
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...Naipaul's 19th book yields its pleasures slowly. Its plot is essentially the passage of ten years, during which the writer lives in a cottage on the grounds of a Victorian-Edwardian manor in a Wiltshire valley within easy walking distance of Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain. In the beginning he arrives; at the end he goes. In between, this writer (hereafter called, for the sake of convenience, Naipaul) thinks occasionally about the first 18 years of his life in Trinidad, "my insecure past," and the scholarship that took him to Oxford and England, "the other man's country." He reveals...
...autobiography nearly to the vanishing point. The unnamed narrator is a writer in his mid-50s, an Indian and a Hindu, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford, who has traveled extensively and lived most of his adult life in England. This person, in other words, is indistinguishable from V.S. Naipaul; and the personality, the tone of voice and cast of mind displayed here resemble the prose of Naipaul's nonfiction (Among the Believers; India: A Wounded Civilization) more closely than that of his other nine novels, including Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. Whether The Enigma of Arrival...
Much of the drama in the book stems from the tensions generated when a ) sensitive grown-up finds himself living in a fantasy of his youth. Naipaul passionately annotates the splendors he observes surrounding the manor cottage: "The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known." Mixed with this euphoria, though, are some troubling recognitions. The writer cannot forget that he is an "alien" in this paradise, racially distinct, a former colonial subject of the power and wealth that made such a place possible: "Fifty...
...garden declines into chaos. A large agricultural concern takes over the surrounding acreage for a while, introducing prefabricated buildings and modern equipment, and then fails; one of the workers hired for this enterprise murders his wife for her infidelity. A London radio personality and book reviewer, distantly related to Naipaul's reclusive landlord, commits suicide. The gardener, whose comings and goings helped the writer regulate his solitary days, is abruptly fired. The man who manages the manor dies suddenly of a stroke. Elms in the valley die out; beech trees near Naipaul's cottage must be cut down; two huge...
...part on an aristocrat who might have arrived from the set of early Monty Python. As a houseguest, Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, liked to borrow a pound from the butler and later tip him with it. The title character of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is a version of the author's father, a West Indian journalist. Seepersad Naipaul publicly labeled the rite of goat sacrifice superstitious. He subsequently received a note in Hindi ordering him to perform the sacrifice or perish within the week, acquiesced, and then went...